I’ve spent the last few days searching my room for bugs, but if Jess is watching then she’s got some pretty specialised equipment, that I can’t even find with all my field training. I even searched the usual places; even under my alarm clock.
Please note this entire paragraph is entirely made up.
Okay so onto part 2 then.
The Canberra trip. So Jess drove Tim, Tom and I to Canberra which is about 4 hours away from Sydney. So that’s like the equivalent of driving to Albany for those of you who are from Perth and have no sense of distance. Man, I should totally take Jess to Albany, if she wants to go. Anyway, Canberra! The drive there is pretty magical. There are lots of beautiful hills and cliffs. The scenery was pretty amazing. So after several hours of driving and a few masterfully sung renditions of ‘I’m on a boat’, we got to Lake George (I’ll post a bunch of photos from my holiday all at once later on, Lake George will be among them). Man, it stretched for miles! There wasn’t any water in the lake, but that was cool because that allowed the little sheep to graze on it. Off in the distance huge wind turbines span, okay I lie… one span the rest were dead still but still it was awe inspiring and humbling. So in front of you, you have this vast open space that seems to stretch for ages, but then behind you rise these giant cliffs the face of which is so rocky one could imagine giants in battle there in the past, rocks smashing down from great heights to form such a fascinating rocky facade. I span around a few times just marveling at such a wonder of nature. But freaking hell it was cold! I believe we were all rugged up to some degree but man! The wing blowing across the lake wasn’t like the Freo doctor; it was like being blasting in the face by a white dragon. Had we waited around any longer ice would have sealed all car doors shut, froze over the motor and we would slowly have turned into human popsicles in the NSW wilderness. …so, you know, it was cold. Such a wonderful place though.
So we drove on to Canberra, not too long to go now. We were going to stay the night there and therefore get double the time we would have to look around the city. So we stopped at the information desk to gather some brochures and prices for accommodation. We stepped inside, looked around and went to speak to Jess who was waiting in the car. After like I’m going to say about 3 minutes in the car talking about our options we went to go back inside to book our accommodation at the front desk. We stepped in front of the automated doors….nothing, we stepped back and tried again….nothing. After yelling at a woman through the window we found out that apparently this place had taken it upon themselves to close a full half an hour earlier then normal, so now we had to travel to the hotel and make our booking directly. As we drove though we were fairly enticed by one place that offer ‘cuddles’ in a package and were also having a discount on all rooms this particular day. So we drove in to enquire. Turns out we could get one room for all four of us for a fairly cheap price. I checked us in. Jess brought to my attention that now I was in fact checked in at two different hotels simultaneously. That was pretty cool, I thought. We made ourselves at home, dumped all our belongings we didn’t want to take with us and set off for a Canberra-style Indian dinner.
I’m getting distracted from the task at hand…shut up! Blogging…okay.
So dinner, it started off really, really nicely we walked in and was greeted by a beautiful aroma, belly dancers were learning their art a little bit away from the tables and large screen TV showed us various Indian music clips. We sat down and eventually ordered. Tim had some Mango thing, Tom had some prawns and Jess and I had… you guessed it Butter Chicken. Well we’re nothing if not consistent, right? 
At least we knows whats we likes…well not in this case. Let me explain. The Butter Chicken came out and looked rather redder then we’re used to. Alright not to worry, it’s all in the taste, right? I took a bite. In my head I’m thinking this isn’t what I believe Butter Chicken should taste like, I’d only really eaten at two other places before, but still. It was something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Luckily Jess’ many fine years as a Butter Chicken expert pays off, her palate fine tuned to every spice and flavour. ‘This just tastes like Bolognese sauce” she said and it’s true, as soon as she said it my brain lid flew off. “It’s true!” I remarked. It was EXACTLY the same as Bolognese sauce, like the canned stuff too not the good stuff. Exactly the same, not one spice added not one flavour out of place. It was Bolognese sauce to the T. We finished up and grudgingly paid for our meals then Jess took us on a tour of Canberra, we passed Parliament House, the same circular roads over and over again (man whoever mapped out the roads for that place should be shot. Okay now your roads are different, they go in circles instead of cornering at 90 degree angles like most roads and every road somehow tries to lead you out of the city, congratulations you’ve cemented your place in society as the world’s biggest ding bat!) Hrmmm maybe the roads are to stop terrorists reaching Parliament House, I guess that plan would work, they would all be yelling to each other to turn left and turn right and they would still be going in complete circles, they the police could come and arrest them. Maybe ding bat was onto something. World’s biggest douche or wildly misunderstood security expert? You decide.
Okay, so where was I? Oh yeah. We also passed Jess’ Grandparents place. It looked like a really nice house. It looked tidy and sweet looking (I don’t know how a house looks sweet, so don’t ask). Then we moved on to the bottle shop and after much deliberation we bought a few bottles each of booze. Went back to the hotel and basically skulled them as fast as we could. Good times. We played blackjack using packets of sugar as currency with the elusive equal packet that everyone wanted (or maybe it was just me?). Jess pretty much owned the shit outta of us, looking down from her sugar empire with glee. Lucky we weren’t playing strip blackjack. Wait, wait. I could have possibly just thought of the best game ever….ready…strip rock, paper, scissors. It’s genius! Now I just need to find someone to ‘play’ with me…any takers? 
I got your rock right here, baby….no? Okay. So we all got a little tipsy (obviously except Tim, but I believe he laughs manically about our tomfoolery behind our back so everyone has fun ) We then went to bed ’cause we had an early start the next day. Notice there I said bed and not sleep because I think after many hours of tossing and turning if was like 4am by the time I actually went to sleep, Jess didn’t have much luck either opting to spend most the night on her DS.
So the next day we got up and had a giant buffet breakfast waiting for us. Toast, cereal, tea, coffee, juice, fruit as well as bacon and eggs. It was pretty nice, even if I didn’t eat all that much. Bacon is always worth it! We checked out of the hotel and went to Questacon which is basically like a huge Scitech. There are levels and levels or crazy scientific machines and thingamagigies. It was lots and lots of fun. They have a giant tesla coil that shoots electricity, which was pretty cool. Though we somehow spent most of our time at the metal ball bearing that you roll around a giant funnel…uh exhibit. It’s funny how entertaining the simplest things can be. It’s sort of like being a little kid again running around to every exhibit in turn and pressing all the buttons and turning all the knobs you can before either being disappointed or gasping in amazement and then rapidly moving on to the next machine in line. It was good fun. Oh and Tim, Tom and I spent like a minute spinning this rubber duck bath thing as fast as we could, I think it was meant to show you centripetal force or something. Haha good times.
Then Tom and I went to this huge shopping mall there, while Tim and Jess went visiting her grandparents. There was this weird chicken place, um I am going to try and find what it’s called. Kingsley Chicken. Yeah…Canberra’s a weird place. I remember liking there motto though, which I now read is ‘Unbelievable value, awesome chips’. Way to tell it how it is mr/miss/mrs/prof/dr/sir Kingsley! I remember having a double espresso and a cappuccino in my hand at one stage and I believe I also had a V at some stage. I’m basically running on caffeine by this point. After a while Jess picked us up and then we went to the ANZAC memorial. Wow, that was just amazing to say the least. The photos really don’t do it any justice. Going though the museum left me depressed and sad but the memorial itself was so celebratory in comparison. It was just so majestic. I…can’t really explain it very well. But it was just wondrous.
By now it was time to be heading back, so we had to skip the miniature village which made me a little disappointed. I remember going to ‘Castle Fun Park’ in Mandurah, I think it’s closed now, but it was just little models of castles and miniature figures. I loved that place, I’d always make my dad stop there when we could, which obviously wasn’t too often as we don’t live anywhere near Mandurah but we went of lots of ‘family drives’… anyway my point is miniature things are cool.
So then we were heading back towards Sydney. We also conveniently passed the Big Marino; it’s just like at the front of a servo seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Still I was happy to add “Seen one of Australia’s ‘big’ things” to the list of stuff I’ve done. Oh and I missed saying about Macca’s in between Sydney and Canberra. I guess not really worth a big mention but there is a Macca’s on the way to Canberra from Sydney (and visa versa) which has Shell service stations on either side of the motorway and has about a dozen registers and I’d say it pretty big, not as big as the one in Thornleigh but still pretty big, and it seemed to be very busy both times we went. What’s funny is that down the road further there is a Hungry Jacks and BP trying to do a similar thing only it was like completely deserted (as far as I could tell). Well…*I* thought it was funny, so there. We continued on our way back to Sydney, Tom taking over part of the way because Jess was getting a little sleepy by this point. We listened to Les Mis part of the way, which really made me want to see it. Apparently they are coming to Perth soon, I’m really going to try and go.
Anyway that was Canberra. And another really long post. Seems like this is going to be at least a 3 parter ladies.
Now, I’m home all alone. Who wants to keep me company? I ascared….
though Sean refused my invitation). Most of the hotels I had been to previously have had Foxtel but this place just had Free-to-air TV but I spent most of my time not in my room anyway so it wasn’t much of a bother. I dumped all my luggage and Jess wrote me a helpful checklist which I have kept to this day. Next Jess took me to see her mum and the lovable Tommy. Jess’ place was about 5 minutes drive or about 15-20 minutes walk away. Very convenient, and if that’s too far there’s a small suburban shopping centre on the way, where you can gather supplies and buckle down for the night if needs be…and regenerate your spells *cough*. 
